WayeeCool [comrade/them]

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For real. The majority of the price difference isn’t materials or workplace safety but privatized vs state enterprise. A sizeable chunk of the $5000 price difference is the cut that goes to the shareholders of General Dynamics. It’s the same reason the Chinese J20 costs so much less than the F35 and had dramatically less production issues.

Russia only had a privatized defense industry from the early 1990s until in 2007 they decided privatization of certain industries was a mistake. They undid the privatization of their aerospace, defense, high tech manufacturing, and key heavy industries. It’s taken almost a decade to repair the damage of privatization and rebuild capacity but we are now seeing the fruits of those efforts.

In Russia their 155mm artillery shells are currently manufactured by KBP Instrument Design Bureau, a wholey owned subsidiary of the Russia state owned Rostec holding corporation.

In the US all their 155mm artillery shells are manufactured at the US government owned Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, which is operated by the private sector defense contractor General Dynamics. That same facility used to be able to produce over a million 155mm field artillery shells per month back in the 1940s before modern factory automation and even today claims to have the ability to ramp back to that capacity (at a cost) with only a couple months notice. As part of the US propaganda blitz, BusinessInsider recently did a PR and tour video of the plant.

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Microsoft branched out over a decade ago and as such became a very useful arm of the US national security apparatus. Reason countries like China, Russia, and Iran have begun efforts to ban Windows on government computers while putting resources into state-maintained Linux distributions.

It used to be the case that Microsoft was just a software company until Microsoft realized third party malware protection and firewall software was half the reason most Windows installs were an unstable mess. To remedy this Microsoft branched out into threat analysis and protection. Ironically this has resulted in Microsoft, via the telemetry they collect through Windows Defender, having one of the most complete pictures of activity involving computing devices. Third party companies only really have data from what’s collected by whatever protection software they have managed to bamboozle customers into installing on their devices while Microsoft is able to have data from almost all Windows devices. Microsoft also has a sizeable footprint in the server and edge computing space, which they also cover with Windows Defender for server or Linux.

Let’s not kid ourselves by calling it gimmicks or overly complicated. It is the same hardware and methods for the Russian military. It also isn’t security through obscurity. Everyone switched to software defined radios for their communication and radar for a reason.

There are methods to combat such jamming but Ukrainian forces don’t have the training or capability. NATO can’t just magicially make the Ukrainian military into one with the capabilities of military super powers like the US, China, or Russia. The US and Russia both have the capacity, infact the Russian military is extremely capable when it comes to the electronic warfare and countering electronic warfare because their military has to be on par capability wise with the US military.

Instead we have sad stories like what’s left of the Ukrainian air force powering down all the electronics in their aircraft as they approach the front line because they have no way to detect and counter Russian electronic capabilities.

The worst part is all the NATO countries are stripping the Active Protection System hardware out of Challenger, Lepord, and Abrams battle tanks before they are delivered to Ukraine. Everyone is paranoid about Russian electronic warfare learning how to jam the radar systems those NATO nations have installed in their tanks. Russian tanks currently on the front line have modern APS hardware while Ukraine is getting battle tanks that are intentionally crippled by NATO.

Another funny and fkd up thing is what will happen with the F16 fighters Ukraine is about to have. The US has stripped out the counter measure hardware that makes an old airframe like the F16 more survivable in an environment with modern anti air missiles being fired at it. Those F16s are going to get turned by Russia into wreckage just as fast as they did with all these NATO battle tanks.